


he will fall through your fingers in flakes

by chiaroscuros



Category: Arrival (2016)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-12
Updated: 2016-11-12
Packaged: 2018-08-30 11:52:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8532013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiaroscuros/pseuds/chiaroscuros
Summary: She is a silent oracle. No one will heed her pain as her prophecies echo across the cavernous expanses of her own mind, as if alone in the hull of a ship.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i watched denis villeneuve's latest work and had some feelings.

Two steady hands enclosed around her trembling one. An ineffable space of warmth and certainty enveloping her. 

This was what Ian would always be. 

 

In retrospect, she realizes it wasn’t all too different from their breakthrough in the ship. She reached out a hand, tentatively. And with wide eyes, he opened up to her touch like a flower.

Clairvoyance was something of fiction and conjecture; there was no space for it in his world of cold words and angled shapes on dry pages. He would never understand; she herself didn’t quite truly.

 

And _yet_. 

 

Some days, they are alone in her makeshift office, poring over another symbol to be translated.

 

He is there standing over her, bent with exhaustion, and suddenly she remembers things that have never happened - she remembers with perfect clarity, the sensation of him holding her, the smell of him - oak and musk - the feeling of his hands clasped together at the small of her back. The feeling of his lips on the bare skin of her neck. 

 

He steps back and stares down at the papers before him, unknowing, and she, trembling in the present silence, touches her fingers against the soft skin at the base of her throat he would one day kiss.

She aches from the memory of things that have not yet come to pass.

 

There was no mistranslation, she realizes. It truly is a weapon. But it is one to be aimed at herself. staring down the barrel of a gun that is her own mind. a silent oracle, with no one to heed her pain as her prophecies echo across the cavernous expanses of her own mind, as if alone in the hull of a ship.

 

And _yet_.

 

This gift, this weapon, fires into the spaces she has _already_ created.

 

Because she had known. Somehow. She had known that she would love him. And there was no revelation, no ship from the sky that needed to tell her this.

 

She couldn’t quite say when the realization dawned on her, somewhere in between the first comforting swipe of his thumb across the thin skin of her wrist under the dimmed yellow lights of an army base and his sudden appearance in the dark corners of her dreams, dreams filled with a litany of things she could not understand for the life of her, and yet such _definitive_   things she knew would stay with her for the rest of her life. 

 

She stares into his eyes as the notion that she realized a long time ago settles within him. He tells her he loves her.  And she takes in the way crinkles appear as he smiles, knowing that they will look this way until the day he dies, her trembling hand at his cheek. As always, his steady one enclosed around it.  

He thinks he understands why, when she kisses him, why there are tears in her eyes. But she  does not explain and merely reaches for his hand. And to her, that conveys all that needs to be said. 

 

A circle has no beginning; there are always these ubiquitous truths. 

 

She will love him. 

She will lose him. 


End file.
